Obama to visit Myanmar, Cambodia, Thailand

Updated at: 11/08/2012 2:05 PM
By JIM KUHNHENN

(AP) WASHINGTON - Fresh from his re-election, President Barack Obama will embark on a trip to Southeast Asia and become the first U.S. president to visit Cambodia as well as the once pariah nation of Myanmar where he will hail the country’s shift to democracy after five decades of ruinous military rule.

The White House says Obama will also visit Thailand and attend the East Asia summit and meet leaders of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations meeting in Phnom Penh, Cambodia.

The trip comes less than two weeks after Obama’s re-election. But it also takes the president out of the country just as he begins sensitive negotiations with congressional leaders about how to avoid looming tax increases and steep cuts in defense and domestic spending.

The symbolic highlight of the trip, no doubt, is Obama’s visit to Myanmar, also known as Burma, where he will meet with President Thein Sein and with Nobel laureate Aung San Suu Kyi

Obama ended the long-standing U.S. isolation of Myanmar’s generals, which has played a part in coaxing them into political reforms that have unfolded with surprising speed in the past year. The U.S. has appointed a full ambassador and suspended sanctions to reward Myanmar for political prisoner releases and Suu Kyi’s election to parliament.

In a statement, White House press secretary Jay Carney said Obama intended to "speak to civil society to encourage Burma’s ongoing democratic transition."

A procession of senior diplomats and world leaders have traveled to the country, stopping both in the remote, opulent capital city Naypyitaw, built by the former ruling junta, and at Suu Kyi’s dilapidated lakeside villa in the main city Yangon, where she spent 15 years under house arrest.

The most senior U.S. official to visit is Hillary Rodham Clinton who last December became the first U.S. secretary of state to travel to Myanmar in 56 years.

The Obama administration regards the political changes in Myanmar as a marquee achievement in its foreign policy, and one that could dilute the influence of China in a country that has a strategic location between South and Southeast Asia, regions of growing economic importance.

But exiled Myanmar activists and human rights groups are likely to criticize an Obama visit as premature, rewarding President Thein Sein before his political and economic reforms have been consolidated. The military is still dominant and implicated in rights abuses. It has failed to prevent vicious outbreaks of communal violence in the west of the country that have left scores dead.

While no U.S. president has ever visited Cambodia or Myanmar, Thailand is one of the America’s oldest allies in Asia and has been a stop for American commanders in chief since the mid-1960s, according to the State Department historian’s office, which compiles records on presidential travel.

George W. Bush visited Thailand twice while president, in 2003 and 2008, Bill Clinton visited in 1996. During the war in neighboring Vietnam, Richard Nixon travelled there in 1969 and Lyndon Johnson in 1966 and 1967, the records show.